


The Lilies of the Field

by goldfinch



Series: In Daylight or Darkness [1]
Category: Being Human (UK)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-31
Updated: 2015-05-31
Packaged: 2018-04-02 03:52:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4044877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldfinch/pseuds/goldfinch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She goes to Barry once, after Ivan. After everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lilies of the Field

**Author's Note:**

> Set pre-Series 3, Episode 5: The Longest Day, for obvious reasons.

Daisy spends the train ride to Barry picking her teeth and eyeing the lesbian couple at the far side of her aisle. They probably think she’s staring because they’re gay, but she isn’t. She could care less what they get up to in bed; she has, herself, gotten up to similar things. She’s staring more because they’re holding hands, because they’re whispering, because they’re bent together like a pair of parentheses on the red fake leather seats, and she wants both to tear their throats out and sob into their jumpers. Like so many other things these days, they remind her of what she’s lost, of what she can't get back no matter what she tries.

“You got a fucking problem?” one of the girls finally asks. Her voice is melodic and low, unsuited for the tone she’s forced it into. She’s still holding her girlfriend’s hand, but now she’s holding it a little tighter.

“No problem,” Daisy says.

Outside, the world passes.

 

 

 

She finds Mitchell’s house easily enough. Vampire or not, he still leaves a paper trail. It might be a false one, looped back through fake dates and relatives and records, but it’s there, and he’s always been the sentimental sort. She hadn’t expected him to live in a place like this, though. It’s an old B&B, last house on the block on a bit of a hill. That’s his car parked out front, though, the same black thing he’s been driving since the 50s. There’s probably at least ten liters of blood dried into the backseat for every decade. Open up the leather, and the foam inside would be tacky and stiff and red.

A woman answers the door. Daisy doesn’t know her; she isn’t that ghost girl Mitchell used to hang out with but a short, compact woman with a wary look in her eyes. She moves like she’s used to standing in people's way.

“Can I help you then?” she says, when Daisy’s stood there for a moment too long, not speaking.

“Maybe you can,” Daisy says. And oh, that’s definitely a whiff of werewolf. Suddenly, curious: “Does George live here?”

“He’s not in at the moment.”

But he lives here. Daisy laughs a little, shakes her head. “Get Mitchell for me then, wouldja darling?”

The woman doesn’t invite her in—which, rude—just leaves her standing on the doorstep as she retreats back into the house. She leaves the door open, though, and Daisy can see her go upstairs, can see Mitchell come down a few seconds later, all in black, hunched in like something’s been carved out of him, like it takes that much effort just to fucking stand up and move.

“Well, you look like shite,” she says, before he can get his mouth open. He’s not happy to see her. She hadn’t expected him to be, of course, showing up at his door like this, but she hadn’t expected the weird panic in his eyes, either. There’s no hiding it, but he’s not even doing a good job of trying. The woman’s come halfway down the stairs again, paused just low enough to get a view of the door. Daisy winks at her.

“Dais. What are you doing here?”

“I heard you moved. Just thought I’d come round for a visit.”

He pauses there for a moment, in the gloom of the hallway, and Daisy wonders what he sees, looking at her, to put such an expression on his face. “Come on,” he says eventually, laying a hand against her waist. She doesn’t see if he looks back or not. “I know a place we can go.”

 

 

 

He takes her to a little park nearer the waterfront, on another hill, not close enough to hear the waves come in but close enough to see them. It’s a tiny park, in a different part of town; there are a lot of trees, and not many people. Some kit on a skateboard, some girl walking by, crying into her cell phone. Mitchell doesn’t even look at them.

“I never quite understood what Ivan saw in you,” Daisy says, stretching out on the grass. “But I suppose, if I live as long as he did, I’ll have some eccentricities too.”

He laughs a little. His eyes are hollow points of light. “Eccentricities. That’s what Herrick used to call it too. Raiding the dressing-up box, like making friends and falling in love was some sort of game.”

Ah, love. ”Whatever happened to her?" she asks. “That woman, I mean.”

He picks at the bit of grass he's got between his fingers, slowly shredding it. "She's dead."

"Did you kill her?" is what Daisy asks, but what she really wants to know is, does it hurt him to talk about that woman, the way it hurts her to talk about Ivan? She knows he loved her, once, that woman, that doctor.

Mitchell shakes his head. “No."

"But you wanted to."

"Once, yeah. Then I realized... Dais, I just—what's the point? Isn't love what we should be striving for, instead of hunger and hatred? Shouldn't we all want what you and Ivan had? You know he told me, when I said I was leaving the vampires because I'd fallen in love, he said he understood, because he had you. He said we all deserved a Daisy." He looks up, and his eyes are steady and warm and so, so sad. "He really loved you, you know."

"I do. He told me every day.” She leans forward then, suddenly hesitant. “I thought I might be able to bring him back. You can do it, you know, if the conditions are right. But it—it didn’t work. I don’t know why.” 

It had worked with Herrick, though. Kneeling in the snow, Cora blathering on about darkness and glory and how Herrick was her king and she his bride. Daisy wouldn’t have been there if she’d had any options left. And then the little bitch had just run off after Herrick when he’d fled, more mindless animal than king of anything, forgetting all about the promise she made and Daisy too weak to make her remember.

She tried it on her own, but—well. Ivan wouldn’t have wanted to come back anyway, though, if it meant coming back the way Herrick had. That isn’t any kind of life at all, and Daisy’s never been suited to playing nursemaid, even when it was her own daughter in her arms. She's too selfish. It was something of a victory to realize that about herself. To realize Ivan was telling the truth, in that bunker, so long ago.

“It's very difficult, isn't it—you might even say impossible—to love someone more than you love the hunger. Even with me and Ivan… if someone had made me choose I don’t—I really don’t know which I would’ve taken. You understand? But I loved him. I really loved him, Mitchell.”

“I know. And I get it. And maybe it made you stronger—together, I mean—to share it.”

“You can’t do that, can you. Or you won’t."

He looks somber at that, but then he grins a little, a sly little wedge of bared teeth. It’s a strange smile; he’s in a strange mood, all of a sudden, something vibrating inside him that she doesn’t recognize. “Well. You and I did, didn't we."

Daisy looks at him, considering. She’s slept with him before, and more than once, but they were high as kites and singing every time, and it’s hard to separate out what had been actual attraction and what had just been the blood. “You haven’t found someone else, then? Someone to fill that aching void in your soul you’re so concerned about?”

And there’s something in his eyes then, almost, a glimmer that maybe, in another time, in another place, if he’d been someone other than who he is—but then it dies, and his lips twist, and he shakes his head. “No. No,” he says again, sighing. He turns inward, twisting a thread on his gloves. “I think I’ve used up all my chances. Now I’m just running out the clock.”

Daisy moves closer. “You’re a vampire,” she says. “There is no clock. We smashed them all, the day we were reborn. You’re indestructible now, Mitchell, or near enough.”

He looks up. “Not always. Not when it counts.”

“Then make it count.”

“I just want to start over,” he whispers. His breath is cool and light against her face.

"Yeah, well. Live and learn, I suppose.” Daisy glances at his lips, then back up. Smirks. “Or not.”

There’s a pause; she holds her breath—

He tumbles her backward into the grass, pressing her against the earth, against the hard bones and muscle of his body. They’ve done this before but not like this. She can feel the warmth of the sun on her skin and she thinks, very briefly, about her daughter in that hospital bed, the sound she’d made as she breathed—and then Mitchell pushes her dress up, and all coherent thought goes right out of her head.

“I blamed you, you know,” he says against her mouth. “For what we did. I told people you made me do it.”

“Well we both know that’s not true, don’t we.”

"Yeah,” he says, and kisses her, kisses her, kisses her. “Yeah, I guess we do.”

The least attractive thing about Mitchell has always been his desperation. The most attractive thing is when he lets it go.

It reminds her, really, a bit of herself, long ago, when Ivan’s hand first slid neatly into hers.

“Daisy, I don’t want to die,” he tells her.

She sighs, and lets him press her back into the grass. “Babe, who does?”

 

 

 

It’s not on the way back to the train station but she stops by the waterfront anyway, buys a ninety-nine and a lager. She eats the ice cream and then drinks the beer, watching the waves come in under the lowering sky. She listens to the gawky squabbling of seagulls under the promenade and smells the harbor, the algae and rot of trapped water. 

There’s a man standing maybe twenty meters down the dock, a rough-looking type in a big jacket. Sharp, hard-edged. He looks old enough to be someone’s da—looks older than her, anyway. He's watching her, but Daisy doesn't pay him much mind.

She finishes her beer. She watches the gulls circle.


End file.
